It is all obvious or trivial except…

Monthly Archives: March 2018

I wanted to cringe, the comment is so desperate. Doesn’t he realise that this is the whole issue the data is meant to reveal? The debate about equal pay for equal work was meant to be have been resolved in 1970. We all know it has not been, but highlighting data on that issue was not the purpose of this new data. The issue now is about precisely why women are not offered the same job opportunities as men, and so are paid less as a result.

More women than men decide to become primary child carer.

And that’s it, that’s the whole and entire explanation. We really don’t need companies to be reporting the gender pay gap to know that.

The gender pay gap reporting requirements. All those companies reporting. They must include all employees, part and full time. But the statistics ombudsman insisted that we shouldn’t do it this way, because more women part timers and part timers get paid less per hour.

So, the law insists upon reporting in he manner in which the stats buys say it shouldn’t be. Seriously?

Just back from the ancestral acres in Ireland. And one of the stories we heard was that Patrick Kielty, from the same village (Dundrum in Co. Down) did a show on an abandoned house/shop in the village.

Apparently this is on YouTube. I can’t find it – can anyone else?

The interest being that the place was, in its time, the shop of great grandfather in Dundrum. The show and abandonment are long after his time, but would be interesting to see the piece if anyone can find it.

Just as an aside would point out that Journalistic Investigation Method No. 1 still works. Wait until starting one’s second pint then ask the barman. Lo! Within 10 minutes we had the location of the g-gfather’s shop and garage down pat, along with a quick guided walk up and down the street.

It did help that the pub, the Dundrum Inn, was a whole 20 yards from either and both.

HMRC’s figures from 2015-16 showed that 6% of tax due in Britain went uncollected – a whopping £34bn. About £1.7bn of this came from avoiding tax by taking legal steps to minimise one’s liability and an estimated £5.2bn came from evading tax illegally. With our public finances strained, it is an insult to diligent taxpayers that multinational firms and high-net-worth individuals can use a complex myriad of loopholes and accounting gymnastics to minimise their tax bill.

By the time we’re down to a couple of percent we’re pretty much done with government work aren’t we?

Since Margaret Thatcher forced compulsory competitive tendering on councils, there has been, astonishingly, no evidence and no research to prove whether outsourcing is value for money. There are no controlled trials, no measuring long-term effects or knock-on costs to the state of lowering pay, finds the Smith Institute.

Outside the gates of the British Museum last week 60 outsourced cleaners, porters, technicians, plumbers and electricians petitioned to be taken back in-house. They were handed over to Carillion five years ago. Now the company’s bankruptcy leaves them in limbo, and they want to return as the museum colleagues they once were.

But where are the rest of them? Carillion crowed to Facilities Management World that it was taking over 138 museum staff in a “hugely prestigious contract”. But those 138 have dwindled to just 60, for the same volume of work. That’s how outsourcing operates, cutting more brutally than public employers dare.

There it is: confirmation if it were needed that the debt is borrowing that must be repaid at cost to future generations even though £435 billion of quantitative easing proves otherwise and we have never repaid public debt, or attempted to do so, because the truth is that this would destroy the money supply.

I think I’m right that G. Brown paid down a bit of the debt in his first couple of years. Lawson was proud of his public sector debt repayment. And didn’t Attlee run a budget surplus to help pay down the war debt?

The story of one man’s pregnancy: ‘It felt joyous, amazing and brilliant”

No, sorry, I’ll not buy it.

OK, sure, pregnancy is all of that. Equally, I’m just certain that the individual believes themselves to be a man, presents as such more often than not and might even have gained the legal right to be considered as such.

I’d even call xe him just to be polite.

But someone with functioning ovaries and womb to the point of being able to carry a child to term simply isn’t male in any useful sense of the definition. Sure, I’m a social dinosaur so eat my shorts.

The only improvement I’d suggest is that ‘the politician’ fails to point out that the private banks create new money whenever they lend – yet somehow this goes unmentioned so the implication seems to be that this never creates any inflation. Hence, when the government creates new money we are always going to end up like Zimbabwe or Venezuela but never, ever when the private banks do it.

We do tend to mention it quite a lot actually. The bank creation of credit – note, not money – being the thing we influence, temper or encourage, by changing interest rates.

The Senior Lecturer has noted that we do in fact change interest rates in order to change credit creation, has he?

The background to this tale is The Packhorse in South Stoke, an area, indeed a pub, I know well. It’s an entirely lovely building in a picture postcard village. It’s also an enormous pub in a village of under 500 people. Back in the day it could be, and was, well supported by such a population, being the proper centre of the community and all that (from memory it sold chocolate from behind the bar, for example, because there was no local sweet shop. That as well as scrumpy so vicious that foreigners – those from more than a mile away – would be limited to halves). These days we just don’t drink that way.

The cost of drinking out is now very much higher than doing so at home, we can’t smoke (yes, sorry, the seasoned topers that are the financial lifeblood of a pub did and do tend to smoke) and this particular pub is just that little bit too far away for a wander to it. It requires either a determined walking expedition or a car ride – and we all do that much less now, and rightly, because of concerns over drink driving.

Ian Stevenson says:
March 18 2018 at 9:36 am
Last night I saw on one of the Sky channels “The Spider’s web’ about the secrecy jurisdictions. I was able to put faces to people you have written about.
http://spiderswebfilm.com/

Reply
Richard Murphy says:
March 18 2018 at 11:21 am
I was asked to be in it and did not have time….

If you don’t know the underlying economics of an issue or subject then it’s going to be easy enough to be confused by what happens surrounding that economic issue or subject. And so it is with the Taka against the US dollar exchange rate.

The rate has been declining over time — good, it should be. That isn’t quite how most think of it but that’s just because most haven’t grasped those little subtleties of what is going on.

Defined contributions pension were made legally possible in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986. Workers were told these new kinds of pensions would give them more individual choice. But individuals proved to be much less economically rational than Thatcher assumed. When given control over their pensions, people tended to make naive financial decisions based on rules of thumb, which led to smaller pension pots. Workers on defined contributions pensions also found themselves at the mercy of the market. If they happened to have the back luck of retiring during a recession, their income was going to be far lower than it might have been. Finally, many employees with defined contributions pensions found their employer was putting much less towards their pensions. According to one analysis, employers spent on average 15% of their earnings on people with defined benefits pensions and just under 3% on people with defined contributions.
…
This leaves today’s young people with four options. The first is exit. Many skilled young people have realised that things are getting worse in the British workplace, and have decided to head for more attractive places such as Australia – which also happens to have one of the world’s best pensions systems.